In the season opener of Abby McEnany’s new Showtime series, Work in Progress, McEnany runs into Julia Sweeney in a bar and recalls how Sweeney’s gender-ambiguous Pat character on Saturday Night Live made her life hell. Watching The Santaland Diaries—the stage show created by Joe Mantello out of David Sedaris’s autobiographical essay that first aired on NPR in 1992—also reminds us that not all comedy from that decade ages equally well....
“So this is what it’s like to be a Yankees fan,” I thought at the beginning of baseball season. There was Kris Bryant, with his Lee Godie eyes and the way his follow-through on a well-executed swing brought him forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were already posing for a bronze statue. (Indeed he may be, having won the National League Rookie of the Year Award last season and moved on to being odds-on Most Valuable Player this season....
The Academy Award nominations were announced this morning by Tiffany Haddish and Andy Serkis. The Shape of Water leads with 13 nominations, with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri garnering nine and Dunkirk close behind with seven. Here are the nominees in the top categories, with links to Reader reviews of the films in contention: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Margot Robbie, I, Tonya...
Few things make the indoors less delightful than harsh, overhead light. The cold months combined with the raging pandemic spell more time than ever in our homes and making them cozier and more relaxing can be as easy as flipping a switch. If you’re in a room with multiple types of light right now, try it: turn on the overhead light and take a look around. Then turn it off and light a wall sconce, table lamp, floor lamp, or some candles....
This is a huge oversimplification, but there are generally two kinds of blues crowds: the Black audience that gravitates toward soul singers, and the white audience that loves instrumental virtuosity. In their time, B.B. King and Albert King were two of the few blues artists to enjoy equal adoration from both crowds, and today Bobby Rush seems set to be the next to pull off that feat. Rush was born in Louisiana in 1933 and moved to Chicago with his family in the early 50s, and he’s become a mainstay on the local blues scene as well as on the chitlin’ circuit, with a live show famous for the shake dancers doing their thing behind him as he sang....
Leor Galil Inside Cafe Mustache’s new space Logan Square coffee shop Cafe Mustache officially opened its second room, which sits in an adjacent storefront at 2313 North Milwaukee Avenue. Owners Kerry Couch, James Stieglitz, and Ralph Darski (of rock outfit Rabble Rabble) have been working on Cafe Mustache’s expansion for about two years. In May 2013 the owners publicly announced plans to take over the storefront next door, which used to house a hair salon, by launching a Kickstarter campaign to cover the costs for permits and hire an architect and contractor to build out the space; the fund-raiser reached its $20,000 goal by the end of June....
Santiago-born singer-songwriter, composer, and film director Álex Anwandter has been dubbed the prince of Chilean pop, no small honor given that the country’s vibrant post-dictatorship scene attracted the first South American Lollapalooza in 2011. Anwandter identifies as queer and has a large LGBTQ+ following, and at the 34th annual Guadalajara International Film Festival this year he received the Premio Maguey Queer Icon award, given to artists who support or embody an open, transgressive, and sexually diverse culture....
At only 22 years old, the Chicago Fire Football Club is fairly new. It’s a baby league amongst other sports teams that have hundreds of years of unpacking to do. There’s still time to address concerns, to undo the wrongdoings, and to improve the league to make it its own. For Chicago Fire supporters like Meredith Miklasz and Jake Payne, that’s exactly what they are set out to do. “I’m very femme,” Miklasz says....
At some point early one evening at Stephanie Izard’s new Duck Duck Goat, I looked up and wondered, “Who are all the dead Chinese?” That’s because the walls of that particular semi-isolated dining room (one of several) are covered with sepia-toned portraits of old-timey Asian people, like a gallery of ghosts, each one tagged with a circular red sticker. A server explained that these incongruous dots are meant to draw the eyes upward when the lights go down and the photos fade into the wallpaper, but they just looked like someone had forgotten to remove price tags after returning from the flea market....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. This week Mike Sula reviews Mordecai, the new fine-dining restaurant that has joined Big Star and Smoke Daddy in the Hotel Zachary, across from Wrigley Field. According to Sula, it’s another hit from chef Matthias Merges and his hospitality company, Folkart Management. Merges has been busy lately—it’s just six months ago that he and celebrity chef Graham Elliot (Top Chef, MasterChef, et al) opened the Randolph Street spot Gideon Sweet....
Who are you really? Well, the late college basketball coach John Wooden famously offered this litmus test: “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is looking.” Today’s cover is a stand-alone work of art by illustrator Greg Houston. Hell, it should hurt, like a punch in the gut. Love always, Mark Konkol Executive Editor Pritzker the sneak disser might as well have said the N-word By Adeshina Emmanuel Pritzker the sneak disser might as well have said the N-word J....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Electric Wizard, Wizard Bloody Wizard Only time will tell if the new Electric Wizard LP will join Dopethrone and Come My Fanatics . . . in the doom-metal canon—as much as I like the bass playing on this one, I’d prefer less blues-rock and more evil down-tuned slop. But I’m just happy they’re still out there, trolling the pious hypocrites who have to believe in covens of satanic baby killers in order to maintain their self-serving persecution fantasies....
Getty Images The Loop and surrounding areas get most of the investment from the tax increment financing program, according to city data. In case you were distracted Tuesday by that other debate—you know, the one between Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia over who’s best equipped to be mayor—you might have missed the latest showdown over the city’s tax increment financing program. TIFs have become a hot issue in the mayoral race as both Emanuel and Garcia promise to dip into the funds to pay for a range of city expenses....
In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this week’s edition, Reader culture editor Aimee Levitt trades recommendations with Northwestern professor, Algren scholar, and fellow Rogers Parker Bill Savage. Both The Battle of Lincoln Park and Hardly Children have been on my to-be-read pile for months. (My copy of The Battle of Lincoln Park is literally six inches from me as I type this....
It was Friday, the 13th of March, 2020, when Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud had to cancel the company’s decade-in-the-making, mega-bucks project—a three-week run of Richard Wagner’s four-opera opus, the Ring Cycle. Friday the 13th was also the last day that the full Lyric staff worked in the opera house. Freud says he couldn’t have imagined that a year later he’d still be working from home, having weathered the cancellation of the entire next season....
Neko Case has rarely voiced her ideas directly in gorgeously, meticulously plotted music, preferring allusion, metaphor, and the pure sound of language, but there’s no missing a sense of mission and drive on her new album Hell-On (Anti). The travails Case endured during the production of the album have been widely reported; her Vermont home burned down while she was in Sweden recording with Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn & John, and she dealt with both a fanatic stalker and a prying reporter....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. An arctophile is a person who collects teddy bears. The fun fact is courtesy of Heather Kenny’s 2006 profile of Patricia Li Klayman, the former frontwoman for the punk band Grand Theft Auto (and member of the Reader ad sales team) who forged a new career for herself as an artist specializing in teddy bears and sock monkeys....
Alan Alda and Britt Robertson in The Longest Ride I never would have expected that modern art and the plight of Austria’s secularized Jews factor crucially in a couple of “feel-good” pictures currently in theaters: the docudrama Woman in Gold and the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride. In the first, Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann, an LA-based Austrian immigrant who successfully sued the Austrian government in the late 1990s to reclaim several Gustav Klimt paintings that the Nazis had taken illegally from her family six decades earlier....
A group of politically engaged Chicago north siders gets together for a casual Fourth of July barbeque in Rebecca Gilman’s 2007-set slice-of-life backyard debate drama. In the tradition of most dinner parties in plays, otherwise-civilized adults devolve over glasses of sangria and bottles of Oberon into sneering and shouting jackasses in the midst of multipronged existential crises related to getting older. In order to propel the conversation into dramatically juicy territory, Gilman unconvincingly gives everyone whiplash-inducing character turns wherein they utter truly jaw-dropping statements to one another, especially when it comes to the decision of whether or not to bear children....
Trivia time: what Golden Girls character still believes in Santa? You don’t need multiple-choice answers to know it’s gotta be sweet dumb Rose Nylund. In Hell in a Handbag’s latest installment in its long-running series, The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Rose (Ed Jones, always right on the money) faces a crisis of belief, and also must confront her fearsome Aunt Inga (Steve Kimbrough), the Cheese Empress of St. Olaf. Meanwhile, Sophia (Ryan Oates) snipes, Dorothy (Hell in a Handbag’s artistic director David Cerda, who also wrote the show) delivers withering glances, and Blanche (Grant Drager) puts the moves on a jolly old elf or two—including a lascivious take on “Santa Baby” where she goes toe-to-toe (and other body parts) with her romantic rival....
